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The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
Polarization of societies is getting more and more attention from researchers working at the intersection of many fields, because it seems to be a defining feature of many public domains. In this paper, we are going to investigate how the…
The impact of social media on critical issues such as echo chambers needs to be addressed, as these phenomena can have disruptive consequences for our society. Traditional research often oversimplifies emotional tendencies and opinion…
The increasing reliance on digital platforms shapes how individuals understand the world, as recommendation systems direct users toward content "similar" to their existing preferences. While this process simplifies information retrieval,…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger…
Imagine a food recommender system -- how would we check if it is \emph{causing} and fostering unhealthy eating habits or merely reflecting users' interests? How much of a user's experience over time with a recommender is caused by the…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life, serving as a primary source of news and information for many users. These platforms increasingly rely on personalised recommendation systems that shape what users see and…
We introduce a simple, geometric model of opinion polarization. It is a model of political persuasion, as well as marketing and advertising, utilizing social values. It focuses on the interplay between different topics and persuasion…
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such…
A polarized social network is modeled as a system of interacting marked point processes with memory of variable length. Each point process indicates the successive times in which a social actor expresses a "favorable" or "contrary" opinion.…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
The dynamics of opinion formation in a society is a complex phenomenon where many variables play an important role. Recently, the influence of algorithms to filter which content is fed to social networks users has come under scrutiny.…
The light received by source stars in microlensing events may be significantly polarized if both an efficient photon scattering mechanism is active in the source stellar atmosphere and a differential magnification is therein induced by the…